By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — On July 1, 700 teaching staff at the elite Moscow State University held an unprecedented demonstration demanding prompt payment and indexation of salaries. Similar actions, coordinated by the Moscow Council of Unions of Science and Education Employees, took place at 40 universities and other tertiary education institutes in the city.
The actions capped a week of discussion and protest by tertiary teachers and scientific staff in various parts of Russia.
In the closed city of Arzamas-16, one of the centres of Russian nuclear weapons production, scientists were due to strike and rally on June 24 in protest against poor working conditions, scarce food and medicines, and two-month delays in the payment of wages. Also in late June, an all-Russian conference took place of university and tertiary college rectors, and a conference of the recently formed Association of Trade Union Organisations of Tertiary Education Institutions. Both gatherings demanded the payment of extensive wage backlogs and a review of the funding system.
These events were the most concerted protest so far against the catastrophic decline of Russian science, higher education and advanced-technology production. Even more than the general fall in output, the collapse in these areas represents the price Russians are paying for their country's forced march back to capitalism. The loss of modern scientific and technological expertise represents a long-term setback, which it will be enormously difficult to overcome.
This is in addition to the immediate perils. On June 10, the English-language Moscow Times reported, scientists at Arzamas-16 sent an open letter to Moscow warning that unless nuclear facilities were properly funded, there was a danger of accidents on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster.
The collapse of science and technology is related to the drastic decline of investment in industry as state subsidies have ended and tightened credit has brought crises of inter-enterprise debts. According to the newspaper Ekonomika i Zhizn, real investment in Russian industry fell by 56% in 1992 alone.
Spending on capital equipment has shrunk dramatically in real terms, and often the falls in demand have been most pronounced for technologically advanced, highly automated machinery. Ekonomika i Zhizn in March cited the example of electronically controlled press and forging machines. In the first two months of this year, output of these machines was only 22% of the figure for the corresponding period of 1992. "The output of high-tech products today is, as a rule, going on at a loss", the paper Business World Weekly reported in May.
The reversal of the perestroika-era effort to modernise Russia's industrial plant and raise the share of high-tech production is in line with the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund. An exhaustive multi-volume study of the Soviet economy published several years ago by the IMF identified the resource and raw materials sector, and especially oil production, as the principal area in which new investment should be concentrated. The implicit message was that a broad renovation of industry should not be attempted.
The current Russian leadership has never dared to say whether it supports these perspectives or not. But the dependent, underdeveloped, essentially third world economy projected by the IMF would have little need of advanced science or a powerful higher education sector. President Boris Yeltsin and his monetarist ministers, meanwhile, are ensuring the decay of science and higher education through drastic funding cuts as part of their ill-conceived plan to curb inflation through a one-sided reliance on reducing government spending.
In a recent Business World Weekly, the chairperson of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that in real terms, his organisation's budget last year was worth only 20% of the figure in 1984. In June a spokesperson for the
Arzamas-16 scientists complained that the nuclear facility did not have the money to pay for gas, electricity or fuel. Izvestia noted on June 24 that tertiary colleges were receiving only 30% of their necessary operating funds from budget sources.
The cuts are now to become even more severe. On June 3 Yeltsin signed a decree entitled "On a Number of Measures to Restrain Inflation", in which government ministries and departments were instructed to reduce their claims on state financing by a further 20%.
"A number of scientific, educational and cultural organisations, unable to carry on their normal work, have simply closed", the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported recently. Many organisations have tried to reorient their work away from "pure" science toward paid problem-solving for industry. Such efforts have rarely had much success; the economic depression is too deep.
Scientific organisations at times resort to selling materials and equipment, in most cases illegally. In major cities, though rarely in the provincial "science towns" where much research is concentrated, institutes have been able to make money by leasing premises to commercial businesses.
When alternative sources of income prove inadequate, institutes cut their spending to the point where useful research often becomes impossible. Experimental equipment and materials are forgone, and subscriptions to foreign journals, essential for keeping abreast of international developments, are allowed to expire. Lack of foreign travel means that valuable contacts are lost.
The last economies made are generally on wages. Nevertheless, these are often paid only in part, or months late. According to Professor Igor Kotlobovsky, chairperson of the trade union organisation at Moscow State University, the government currently assigns only half the funds needed for universities to meet their wage bills.
Even when paid in full, salaries in science and higher education now provide a sharp disincentive to talented
students who might want to continue in academia. According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, as late as 1990 average wages in science were 13% above those in industry. By early this year they were 40% below. A professor now earns less than a bus driver.
Tertiary education staff and scientific personnel often spend much of their time working at second jobs. The temptation is great to quit entirely. According to "expert assessments" quoted in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the number of scientific workers in Russia fell in 1992 by 400,000. At Moscow State University, Kotlobovsky told the Moscow Times, "about 300 of our best teachers, out of a total of 5000, have quit over the past year to move into business". Many scientists leave Russia altogether, often for the United States. According to Business World Weekly, about 100,000 researchers and scientific and technical workers have emigrated each year for the past three or four years.
For engineers, "reform" has brought similar traumas. With investment close to a standstill, little design or development work is taking place. "However bitter it is to admit it", the Moscow daily Trud observed during June, "the labour of engineers is less necessary in the productive field today than is the labour of industrial workers".
School-leavers now have little incentive to train as technologists, and enrolments in engineering faculties have declined sharply. Even in the State Oil and Gas Academy — serving one of the areas in which, if the IMF is to be believed, jobs will be abundant and salaries high — the number of new students is reportedly down by a third.
Russia threatens to become a country whose bright young people are skilled in duping customers, dodging tax and bribing police, but where producing sophisticated goods at world standards of quality and efficiency is a lost art.